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[Sordid]

Yeah, this might work, as a solution, with some important caveats. Probably the biggest one would be, "no player control, other than setting a destination and letting your ship stay on auto-pilot" and the System would need to have a sensible warmup / cooldown time and an auto-shutoff when enemies are near, so it's not abuseable.  I'll try it and see if it's a terrible idea or not- no guarantees, last time I messed with combat speeds (zero-flux boost) it produced some pretty whacky results, lol.

Eh... if you feel inspired to mess around with that for fun, knock yourself out. Don't bother for my sake, I don't really care. Even if it worked, it would barely make a dent in the issues this game has in my eyes. I've pretty much given up in that regard. Sure, I'll play the next version two years from now, make half a dozen posts on the forums complaining about the same old fundamental design faults that go unaddressed, and disappear into the ether again. But hey, at least it actually still has forums. That's rare these days, thumbs up for that.

[intrinsic_parity]

Now that IR pulse laser is 500 range .8 flux/damage 150 DPS, having a tac laser at the same range with half the DPS and worse efficiency plus a hullmod does feel a bit odd. Graviton beam at 500 range 100 kinetic DPS is at least interesting but still pretty weak. I wouldn't mind some form of buff, but it could also be like 20% extra damage instead of longer range. Losing range on PD weapons also seems like a negative IMO.

RE: bounty payouts
The first few bounties you get from potential contacts/bar missions feel too low end, it almost feels like they don't scale at all and you're getting starter bounties with worse payouts. I did a couple of the 'normal' bounties right away and by the time I found a contact who gave bounties, even the high end options were quite a bit less money and/or further away than my other options. Now I am getting more reasonable bounties from the contacts I invested in, but I think if I didn't know, I wouldn't have taken the first few. Maybe I have just gotten unlucky with rolls though.

Pirate base bounties are also too far nerfed IMO, 30-40k is not enough, I think a similarly difficult fight against ships would pay 2-3 times as much. Maybe 60k tier 1, 90k tier 2, 120k tier 3.

[Histidine]

Unsubtle vagueblog:

Frigate vs. frigate chases in the early game are a problem, but nothing that can't be solved by spending one of the starting story points to bake SO into a frigate (although a new player won't think to do this).

Outside the early game, if your ships have both a range and speed disadvantage you straight up misconfigured them.

I complain about ally AI as much as anyone else, but if it was that braindead I would've lost a ship in my current 0.95 run more than once every... I doubt it's less than 6 battles (and the last one I lost wouldn't have been player-piloted). It's not even as if losing a ship in combat is that big a deal since recovery was introduced several major versions ago. Seriously, use your allies!

At some point complaining that the game no longer lets you solo multi-capital fleets is... let me just put it this way, there isn't some fundamental reason this is something that should be possible, other than it being possible before. And a normal person would not expect it to be possible for players who aren't extraordinarily good.

[Cathair]

Pirate base bounties are also too far nerfed IMO, 30-40k is not enough, I think a similarly difficult fight against ships would pay 2-3 times as much. Maybe 60k tier 1, 90k tier 2, 120k tier 3.

Yeah, I noticed this too. To give a frame of reference, I'm running a pretty unfocused ragtag fleet of a couple cruisers, three combat destroyers plus a couple mules, some high-tech frigates, and assorted logistics. I just completed two ~150k bounties consisting of multiple cruisers and destroyers; the second one was a bit rough but I didn't lose anything permanently.

Meanwhile, there's a pirate base bounty available at 40k, when I'm pretty sure this fleet would get rekt by even a T1 station.

[Eji1700]

Pirate base bounties are also too far nerfed IMO, 30-40k is not enough, I think a similarly difficult fight against ships would pay 2-3 times as much. Maybe 60k tier 1, 90k tier 2, 120k tier 3.

Yeah, I noticed this too. To give a frame of reference, I'm running a pretty unfocused ragtag fleet of a couple cruisers, three combat destroyers plus a couple mules, some high-tech frigates, and assorted logistics. I just completed two ~150k bounties consisting of multiple cruisers and destroyers; the second one was a bit rough but I didn't lose anything permanently.

Meanwhile, there's a pirate base bounty available at 40k, when I'm pretty sure this fleet would get rekt by even a T1 station.

It feels somewhat odd. My early game strat in previous patch was to just make base hunting fleets.  It felt "right" to basically be carting my trebuchet's around (carriers loaded with piranhas, often 6ish wings) that i wouldn't deploy to most fights, but came out to siege bases.

Even doing this, it's probably too cheap, especially given you're usually facing a fleet with it that would often be about 40k worth if it were a bounty itself.

You can zig and zag the fleets sometimes, and then the base is easy pickings, but even then 40k feels really really cheap for the hassle/specialization.  I agree they can't all be 200k, that was nuts, but i do feel that 70-80k is probably more appropriate. 

[Warnoise]

I hate the new quest balance.

A quest that tells me to kill a fleet that has a bunch of cruisers in the other side of the universe for like 70k? Just going there would cost 70k, excluding the potential losses and everything.

Quests got nerfed so hard that there's no point in doing them anymore.

I do love the new frigate balances though. Even though some frigates now punch way above their weight classes though

[ApolloStarsector]

1. Agree that the formulas for skills being nerfed by fleet size are quite unintuitive. Maybe will get used to it.

2. Love the new skill system overall, will need more play time to be sure.

3. Story points are given way too easily. Could cut them in half.  EDIT: nevermind. Please don't cut story points in half! You can run out very easily in the end-game.

4. Overall changes, improvements, and polish, are excellent.

5.

No woman in the history of humanity has ever acted like this. The gender dice roll for all dialogue and characters is hilariously immersion breaking at some points. The first time I encountered this dialogue, it was a rough looking man. I thought, wow, this is really great writing.

[Sordid]

It's not even as if losing a ship in combat is that big a deal since recovery was introduced several major versions ago.

Except that, as I explained, that gives it a d-mod, which means it'll die easier next time. So after a few fights, it becomes worthless, and you have to run around to find a replacement, which is tedious and unfun. Apparently search engines are not a thing in the future, and you have to find what you're looking for by physically going from store to store. Save scumming is tedious and unfun too, but less so. Generally speaking, that's one of the major problems this game has, in a lot of situations you're just picking the lesser evil with no actually appealing options available to you.

There is a skill that gives you a "chance to remove a d-mod from a randomly selected ship in your fleet every two months", but that's just laughable. How much of a chance? 90%? 25%? 1%? It doesn't say, and I'm sure as hell not about to pick it and spend several years of game time collecting a sufficient sample size to figure that chance out. If that skill was first in the branch and said "remove a d-mod every week", yeah, that would go a long way to solving the problem (though solving it completely would also require removing the word "almost" from skills boosting recovery chance). But as it stands, hell naw. Underwhelming skills are a long-standing complaint, and not just from me.

At some point complaining that the game no longer lets you solo multi-capital fleets is... let me just put it this way, there isn't some fundamental reason this is something that should be possible, other than it being possible before. And a normal person would not expect it to be possible for players who aren't extraordinarily good.

Giving extraordinarily skilled players the ability to do extraordinary things seems like a pretty good reason to me. What Alex has done over the last half a decade of fiddling with skills and hull mods is raise the skill floor and lower the skill ceiling, neither of which is a good thing.

[Caymon Joestar]

It's not even as if losing a ship in combat is that big a deal since recovery was introduced several major versions ago.

Except that, as I explained, that gives it a d-mod, which means it'll die easier next time. So after a few fights, it becomes worthless, and you have to run around to find a replacement, which is tedious and unfun. Apparently search engines are not a thing in the future, and you have to find what you're looking for by physically going from store to store. Save scumming is tedious and unfun too, but less so. Generally speaking, that's one of the major problems this game has, in a lot of situations you're just picking the lesser evil with no actually appealing options available to you.

There is a skill that gives you a "chance to remove a d-mod from a randomly selected ship in your fleet every two months", but that's just laughable. How much of a chance? 90%? 25%? 1%? It doesn't say, and I'm sure as hell not about to pick it and spend several years of game time collecting a sufficient sample size to figure that chance out. If that skill was first in the branch and said "remove a d-mod every week", yeah, that would go a long way to solving the problem (though solving it completely would also require removing the word "almost" from skills boosting recovery chance). But as it stands, hell naw. Underwhelming skills are a long-standing complaint, and not just from me.

At some point complaining that the game no longer lets you solo multi-capital fleets is... let me just put it this way, there isn't some fundamental reason this is something that should be possible, other than it being possible before. And a normal person would not expect it to be possible for players who aren't extraordinarily good.

Giving extraordinarily skilled players the ability to do extraordinary things seems like a pretty good reason to me. What Alex has done over the last half a decade of fiddling with skills and hull mods is raise the skill floor and lower the skill ceiling, neither of which is a good thing.

1. Getting a Dmod on your ship isn't the end of the world, depending on the Dmod, it doesn't even mean the ship will even die easier. Hell, a ship with a bunch of Dmods is only slightly worse than a no Dmod one. And it's not like it's impossible to get rid of Dmods beyond the new field repair skill, that's what Restoring is for. Getting the money isn't that hard.

2. A single ship, regardless of size should not be able to solo a fleet with multi capitals in it. Plain and simple. That is terrible game balance with little to no skill involved. Which is why Alex moved away from it I assume.

[Sordid]

1. Getting a Dmod on your ship isn't the end of the world, depending on the Dmod, it doesn't even mean the ship will even die easier. Hell, a ship with a bunch of Dmods is only slightly worse than a no Dmod one. And it's not like it's impossible to get rid of Dmods beyond the new field repair skill, that's what Restoring is for. Getting the money isn't that hard.

If d-mods are as irrelevant as you say, then they are completely pointless and should just be removed entirely.

2. A single ship, regardless of size should not be able to solo a fleet with multi capitals in it. Plain and simple. That is terrible game balance with little to no skill involved. Which is why Alex moved away from it I assume.

Good and bad balance are a matter of opinion, it just depends on what you want from the game. If you want a game where the player has agency and their actions matter, then making them very powerful is good balance. It's only bad balance if you want a game where the player matters very little and most of the work is done by allied AI. That's been the case for some years now; the more you progress in the game and the more ships you amass in your fleet, the less you matter and the more the game plays itself. If that's what you want from the game, good for you, but that's not the kind of game I backed in early access nine years ago.

[Grievous69]

Good and bad balance are a matter of opinion, it just depends on what you want from the game. If you want a game where the player has agency and their actions matter, then making them very powerful is good balance. It's only bad balance if you want a game where the player matters very little and most of the work is done by allied AI. That's been the case for some years now; the more you progress in the game and the more ships you amass in your fleet, the less you matter and the more the game plays itself. If that's what you want from the game, good for you, but that's not the kind of game I backed in early access nine years ago.

Sounds like a bad player problem, not bad game balance problem. There's plenty of videos where people on their own destroy half of the enemy fleets without breaking a sweat in a 15 DP ship or less. You're flat out wrong if you genuinely think AI does most of the work.

[Sordid]

Sounds like a bad player problem, not bad game balance problem. There's plenty of videos where people on their own destroy half of the enemy fleets without breaking a sweat in a 15 DP ship or less. You're flat out wrong if you genuinely think AI does most of the work.

You do realize that those videos get posted specifically because they show something exceptional, right? Those videos represent only a very small subset of players who only post a very small subset of their experience playing the game. Judging game balance or player skill on the basis of a highlight reel is a poor idea.

To answer my own question, no, you clearly do not realize that.

[ReconUHD]

I share your opinion that the skill system needs better work. I don’t think the open skill tree from 0.91 was the best, but the current one forces critical trade offs early in the game with little information and is truly anxiety inducing. For example, the first two skills in technology are both crucial to smuggling, why am I forced to lock into either? The system has become a de facto class system, which should have been fulfilled bY the choices of ships and mods.

[intrinsic_parity]

If the player is too powerful, then the game becomes boring because the player can play poorly/make mistakes and still have no/minimal consequences. In that case, the players actions don't matter because they could have done (more or less) anything and still won. If a frigate is so strong that it can kill cruisers and capitals with ease (the weakest ship with skills kills the strongest ship without skills), then there's no challenge in combat, you win by default. That's the old trope of making easy mode for game reviewers , they feel like they're making a difference/doing a lot to win (and give a good review) when a 5 year old could win just as easily. No point in trying to get better at a game when minimal effort is already enough to win, it's unsatisfying.

In big fleets, the player is still the hero, I really don't agree that the player doesn't matter in big fleet battles. Certainly you can take easy fights where your AI can win without you (with any sized fleet), but you absolutely can take much more difficult fights if you pilot well (meaning you would lose those fights unless you pilot very well and also manage your fleet correctly with orders/strategies). To me, that means my actions are still significant and meaningful, even if I don't kill every ship myself. 

[randomone]

One thing I've noticed with the new raiding changes are that core pirate bases are now supply pinatas. One mudskipper full of marines pays itself off after one raid, there rarely guarded by fleets due to the random activity of the other factions patrols, and because there's no reason to use transponders at pirate bases anyway the relation penalty means nothing.

Now I don't think the raiding itself needs to be nerfed, I just think there should be some sort of retaliation against you for just beelining towards the nearest red station because you're too lazy to detour to Chicomoztoc. This is the thing that should result in bounty hunter fleets actively chasing the player, maybe even hook it up with the new bar NPC mechanic by having a normally mundane mission instead lead you into an ambush or something. This should mostly apply to established pirate bases; any randomly generated bases on the fringe should still be a free for all.